The Plane That Radicalized Ukraine

“I’m an American. We must bomb Putin. That’s enough!” a man screams in English at the Dutch Embassy in Kyiv when I arrive there. I hear multiple ‘thank yous’ in response from a crowd of dozens of people who organized a spontaneous open-air memorial at the embassy’s doors to honor the dozens of Dutch passengers killed in the downed Malaysian plane, which met its fiery end Thursday in a wheat field around 500 miles southeast of the Ukrainian capital.

It’s midnight, but the crowd is only getting bigger. Some are crying. In the middle of flowers and candles a girl stands with a numb face, holding a cardboard sign with the handwritten words “Putin is a killer!” But for all the anger at the Kremlin, many in the crowd also blame the tragedy on the West’s inability to take Ukrainian crisis seriously and confront Russia. “Is this finally enough for you to notice what Russia does to this country?” a middle-aged Ukrainian woman asks me, noticing my international press badge.

There it was—a microcosm of the new political reality in post-revolutionary Ukraine, a cauldron of seething public anger, escalating violence and rising frustration with the West.

Into this volatile mix now comes the downed Malaysian airplane. It is already radicalizing local politics, where the West is rapidly losing esteem and “peace talks” have become a toxic term for Ukrainian politicians. Kyiv’s political class wants to win this war on the battlefield, not at the negotiating table.

When Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko addressed the nation on the night of the catastrophe, he left no room for doubt as to who is the responsible party and what his country wants from the West. He tied the rebel missile attack to Russia and drew strong parallels to the global war on terror: “Today, our war has spilled over the Ukrainian borders. The consequences of this war have already reached the whole world.” By branding the rebels as international terrorists, Poroshenko made a dramatic play for Western sympathies.

After Poroshenko’s speech, politicians from all over the political spectrum flocked to social media and the airwaves, bashing Russia and the separatist rebels for the tragedy, demanding that the West harden its position on the Eastern Ukraine war. Anatoliy Hrytsenko, a prominent politician and former 2014 presidential candidate, hammered Germany in a public Facebook post: “After a Russian missile fired from a Russian anti-aircraft system by Russian soldiers, Angela Merkel still sticks to her pro-Kremlin mantra. Where’s the limit of the cynicism?”

Even though there are still no investigators at the crash site, the Kyiv government launched a public relation blitz minutes after the tragedy, blaming Russia and the rebels for the downed Malaysia airliner. Hours later, Ukraine’s Security Service released what it claimed to be intercepted communications of Ukrainian separatists discussing the incident with their Russian handlers. One rebel says, “We have just shot down a plane.”

Ukrainian officials are now working around the clock to gather all possible evidence of what kind of military equipment the rebels have and how exactly Russia is supplying them with it, my government sources told me. With the plane now dominating the headlines, they feel they may never get a better opportunity to present their case against the Kremlin to the West.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, of course, is not taking any of this lying down. He fired back at the mounting allegations Thursday, saying “this tragedy would not have occurred if there were peace in that country, or in any case, if hostilities had not resumed in southeast Ukraine. And certainly, the government over whose territory it occurred is responsible for this terrible tragedy.” The Russian media, almost all of which is under Kremlin control, is vigorously promoting the narrative that either Ukrainian military jets shot down the plane or it simply fell apart in the sky.

Maxim Eristavi is an independent writer based in Kyiv. He’s been covering the 2014 Ukrainian revolution since the very first day and previously worked as CEO of Ukraine’s first international news-radio station, Voice of the Capital, and as a journalist at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Follow him on Twitter @MaximEristavi.